Hot Topics:

Among top Colorado Democrats, gap remains on supporting Hillary Clinton

National delegates, state legislators split on uniting behind presumptive nominee

By Ellis Arnold

The Denver Post

Posted:
06/08/2016 07:20:01 AM MDT

Updated:
06/08/2016 02:55:43 PM MDT

Hillary Clinton (Associated Press)

As Hillary Clinton's Colorado supporters set their sights on the general election following her wins Tuesday, those in Bernie Sanders' camp show little sign of conceding defeat.

“This kind of flag-waving and celebrating … is disrespectful to those who feel that the democratic process is flawed,” said state Rep. Joe Salazar, a delegate to the national convention angry about Clinton's use of Democratic superdelegates to claim her party's nomination.

“Hillary Clinton can't be trusted,” Salazar said, going on to say Clinton is “pulling strings with her friends in the media.”

The holdouts underscore the long-running feud in Colorado, a swing state that Sanders easily carried at this spring's caucuses.

Clinton supporters say that fight should have run its course.

“I think he has the right to (contest the nominating convention),” said Colorado state House Speaker Dickey Lee Hullinghorst. “I doubt very much that that will happen.”

Seth Masket, professor and chair of the political science department at the University of Denver, suggested that Sanders' supporters “have no chance of winning this.”

“Clinton has clinched it — there's no reason we'd expect superdelegates who have pledged her their support to change,” he said.

Advertisement

The latest push-back from Sanders also follows a report by the Associated Press that called the nominee race for Clinton before voters even went to the polls Tuesday, based on interviews with most superdelegates and tallies of pledged delegates from previous contests. Salazar had strong words for the Democratic party's system of using superdelegates — unelected and unbound delegates who technically can change their minds until the national convention July 25.

But Sanders took the Colorado caucuses by more than 18 percent, and Salazar's criticisms start from that show of support. He and others argue it's time for the party rethink rules that govern use of superdelegates.

“(It's) a voter suppression system,” Salazar said of those rules.

“If you're a Hillary Clinton supporter, you're loving the superdelegate system — if I'm talking to Sanders supporters, they think it's voter suppression. And that's my personal opinion as well, as an attorney who practices constitutional and civil rights law.”

Clinton was on the other side of this conflict in 2008 against then-Sen. Barack Obama: she started the primary season with three times as many superdelegates as Obama, but his count surpassed hers in May.

Clinton conceded that race on June 7 that year, but before polls opened Tuesday Sanders remained committed to taking the race all the way to the convention.

“There's a lot of news cycle between now and July,” Salazar said, noting Clinton's e-mail investigations still may result in criminal indictments. “There's a lot of time for the wheels on the bus to fall off.”

Other Democrats are brushing off that possibility.

“I don't think (that holds) a candle to the out-and-out fraud and other serious issues that Donald Trump faces with (Trump University) alone,” said Hullinghorst, a Colorado delegate to the Democratic convention, referencing the ongoing legal battle Trump faces from former students of his real estate school.

“No, I don't foresee (the e-mails) being a problem,” said Guzmán. She expects Clinton to be able to unite the party and appeal to Sanders' signature issues — campaign finance, income inequality, education and the minimum wage.

“She has said many times, ‘I know you're not supportive of me right now, but I'm supportive of you,' ” Guzmán said. “And I think she's honest about that.”

Lightning has 5A state title aspirations once againIt was the only home plate the Legacy varsity softball field had ever known, and there it was last Saturday, in its tattered state, dug out of the playing surface and relegated to a lonely, unused existence. Full Story

The Boulder alt-country band gives its EPs names such as Death and Resurrection, and its songs bear the mark of hard truths and sin. But the punk energy behind the playing, and the sense that it's all in good fun, make it OK to dance to a song like "Death." Full Story